MySQL may soon have another choice for a transaction storage engine besides Oracle's InnoDB, thanks to Solid Information Technology and its SolidDB.

Last October Oracle bought Finnish database vendor Innobase and its InnoDB
database technology, which is a critical component of MySQL's
database. The acquisition raised the ire of some in the open source
community that Oracle could use its new acquisition to somehow affect MySQL.

SolidDB is a potential replacement for InnoDB, though SolidDB is currently
not yet open source and does not yet have a formal announced partnership
deal with MySQL to include the technology.

SolidDB is, however, on track to being open sourced under the GPL
as part of new effort from the Finnish vendor to scale out its
business faster.

Paola Lubet, vice president of marketing and business
development at Solid, told internetnews.com that Solid's proprietary
transaction storage engine technology has some 3 million installations and is
included in HP's OpenView application, among others.

By open sourcing SolidDB, Lubet noted that Solid hopes to gain access to the MySQL ecosystem.

Though Solid will be demonstrating its technology at next week's MySQL
user conference, Lubet noted that Solid is not yet announcing a partnership
with MySQL.

"There is more news to come on this front," Lubet said.

The SolidDB application prototype will be available by the conference start
date for downloading, though it will still be a closed source program at that
point. Lubet explained that Solid is going through the process to put the
code under GPL.

"We own 100 percent of the intellectual property of this code that we are
putting open source," Lubet said.

As a result, she doesn't expect there to
be any legal or indemnification issues for users of the open source SolidDB
when it is available.

Though Solid is making its technology open and available for MySQL and
others to use, that doesn't necessarily mean that MySQL will use it to
replace Oracle's InnoDB.

There is widespread speculation that Starkey's
goal at MySQL is to build an InnoDB replacement from scratch.

But Lubet isn't overly concerned about MySQL's efforts.

"I think MySQL is doing the right thing doing their own storage engine
from scratch and that is great," Lubet said.

"Our understanding is that
there will not be an overlap with what we are doing, and if over time they
will develop their own storage engine tools that do what ours does, that is
completely their right and they should do it. It's just that it's going to
take time.

"It's different to have a storage engine and then to have a proven robust
storage engine, and that is what we are doing," Lubet continued. "This is our
bread and butter and what we think we can uniquely contribute to the open
source space."